October 05, 2009

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As Betsy McCaughey returns to the scene for another fight against health care reform, New Republic editor Frank Foer is still thinking about the piece she wrote for the magazine 15 years ago.

“To me, it’s an original sin that I hope we can expunge,” Foer told POLITICO.

McCaughey’s controversial 1994 piece, “No Exit,” was commissioned by then-editor Andrew Sullivan. Some believe the piece helped derail health care reform as McCaughey’s arguments in TNR—which included references to page numbers and footnotes from the 1,000-plus-page bill—influenced the political debate in Washington.

But there have long been detractors questioning the piece’s accuracy—and recently, ethical questions have emerged about McCaughey’s interaction with the tobacco industry while penning her anti-health care article.

In 1995, The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote that McCaughey’s claims were “simply false,” and Mickey Kaus, writing in TNR that same year, commented on why the magazine wasn’t exactly celebrating winning the National Magazine Award for her work.

“She got some things right. But she got a lot wrong,” Kaus wrote. “In the process, she completely distorted the debate on the biggest public policy issue of 1994. Give her a medal.”

Indeed, the McCaughey piece has been a sticking point for TNR staffers for some time. And when Foer took over as editor in March 2006, the magazine recanted McCaughey’s article and formally apologized for it. But still, Foer said he “wanted to make it our mission to be on the right side this time” and pointed out that he’s “made health care reform a pretty important issue for the magazine.”

Now, Michelle Cottle writes a quintessential TNR hatchet job profile—also titled “No Exit”—that details McCaughey's “never-ending lunacy." The piece, which went live this morning, also mentions the magazine’s role in McCaughey’s rise in the political scene.

A constitutional scholar by training, McCaughey (pronounced “McCoy”) blazed to fame in 1994 as the person who drove a stake through the heart of Hillarycare, with a detailed (and, as it turned out, false) takedown of the plan published in this very magazine. Fifteen years later, she has reemerged for an encore, penning op-eds and making the TV and radio rounds to issue apocalyptic warnings about the horrors lurking in the fine print of Obamacare.

Cottle writes that although McCaughey’s reading of the Clinton health care bill "may have been uncommonly thorough, it was also fundamentally incorrect—or grossly dishonest, depending on your view of her (and of a recent Rolling Stone article exposing her consultations with Big Tobacco during the writing)."

Sullivan, last week on his blog, commented on the Rolling Stone scoop about McCaughey consulting with Philip Morris back in 1994.

“I certainly had no idea about any of this at the time. I take responsibility for publishing the piece, and feel that airing some of the internal fight over it would violate confidences. But at no point was I aware of a three-part series, claimed by the tobacco lobbyist. But I did not commission the piece as the Manhattan Institute notes.

Sullivan did not return a request for comment on TNR addressing the McCaughey piece in its latest issue. But even five years after commissioning it, Sullivan still seemed supportive of McCaughey, writing a short, glowing profile of her in Esquire in 1999. There, Sullivan wrote that “McCaughey’s voice has the decibel level of Camille Paglia’s and the intellectual suppleness of Margaret Thatcher’s…. Sexy, then, in the way, say, that Arianna Huffington is sexy.”

Also in Esquire, Sullivan mentioned how owner Marty Peretz had talked up McCaughey him, asking what type of piece she could do for TNR.

So what does Peretz think 15 years on?

“I do not think Betsy is an intellectual fraud. Not at all,” Peretz wrote in an email.

“I have not read the Cottle piece and I do look forward to doing that,” he continued. "But the issue that McCaughey went after was one of the most intricate and economically challenging ones that America has faced, as we can see from the present debate.”

Peretz said that what defeated the Clinton was “the moral and intellectual hauteur with which it was presented," and that it happened early in Clinton’s tenure, “when nobody knew whether they could count."

Also, Peretz wrote, “their worst tactical error was to do up what was I think [was] an eleven-page memo ‘rebutting’ the New Republic article, a sign of its importance and weight.”

The lying, vile putrid Fascist right has been using Big Lie propaganda as a means to achieve their ends (just other despotic authoritarian regimes) for years. These people just lie like it's nothing, and they make up this warped alternate "reality" where whatever comes to mind that's pleasing to them is "true" based solely on the fact that it's pleasing to them. Then they say that everyone outside of that bubble, who actually isn't psycho and who actually lives in the real, actual world, is "biased". There is something seriously wrong with these idiots and they are just foul, rotten and obnoxious to the core.

Really, I think Sullivan was the one who approved that piece, but someone who bought Beachamp's twisted tale, as US soldiers as
rampaging 'reivers' should be a little more circumspect, but what do I know